Currently, medical students and OBGYN residents in the U.S. are not required to take any courses in perimenopause/menopause. Most women go through these periods with zero support or education from their doctors, including OBGYNs. Doctors often ignore and invalidate their symptoms, say they are "natural", and refuse to prescribe necessary hormone replacement therapy due to ignorance and laziness. Most ailments are naturally occurring, and yet we treat those. Why are we OK with women suffering?

According to a 2021 New York Times piece, most medical students get an hour lecture during their entire schooling, if that. 20% of OBGYN residents never get any menopause education at all. 

And women are suffering. Menopause can trigger the following: obesity, osteoporosis, depression, psychosis, heart disease, diabetes, sarcopenia, UTIs, dementia, loss of executive functioning. 

Hormone replacement is a mostly safe treatment according to the latest research, but many practitioners are willfully ignorant of this. 

There are no public health programs in the U.S. or even a CDC webpage designated to educate and aid women in this mid-life transition. And it affects every single woman - and all people assigned female at birth. 

We are told, "It's just natural. You have to put up with it." 

Cancer is natural. Disc degeneration is natural. Degraded cartilage and arthritis is natural. Erectile dysfunction is natural. Do we not do our best to treat and resolve these conditions?

So why is menopause different?

The message is that we are OK with women suffering. After all, we suffer from all sorts of poor health outcomes thanks to a sexist medical system that centers men in research, diagnostic criteria, and treatment protocols. 

Let's tell the American Medical Association, the Surgeon General, the CDC, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education that we deserve better. 

We deserve

1. Mandatory course on menopause in medical school for all practitioners and specialties and how it impacts every bodily system. This training must highlight the fallacies of the Women's Health Initiative Study and include training on the true safety profile and strong benefits of HRT.
   
   
2. Incentivize and/or require OBGYNs to become NAMS Certified Menopause Practitioners
   
   
3. Require psychiatry students to take a course(s) on the female hormone-span, focusing on all three major events: puberty, postpartum, and menopause, and how hormones interfere and affect psychiatric conditions.
    
4. Create a public health initiative that centers the importance of hormone replacement therapy and educates the public and clinicians of the true cancer risk, using absolute risk numbers, not relative risk numbers, which are misleading. 
   
   This public health initiative reveals the many diseases that can emerge at the menopausal transition and how to prevent their onset. 
5. Encourage further research on peri/menopause treatment modalities

Sign today!